Airlines regularly update in-flight entertainment (IFE) content on their aircraft, typically during the “turn around” time between successive flights when an airliner may be parked next to a jetway or gate at an airport ground terminal. Currently, the usual manner in which IFE content and other data needed by the aircraft is updated consists of sending maintenance personnel out to the aircraft who then manually (e.g., either through optical or magnetic media) transfer new IFE content onto the onboard file servers. Such a method can be slow and expensive however, due to the need for using trained personnel and having the personnel travel to the aircraft, connect equipment, monitor the transfer, disconnect the equipment, and return to the ground station.
Because of the large amount of data required to update the IFE content and other information, transferring data using other techniques, such as radio frequency (RF) communications, has not been a practical or cost effective alternative because of the high bandwidth required for such a system to update the data within a commercial airline's average airport turnaround time constraint, which may typically be about an hour between successive flights. In the future, RF based systems may increase enough in speed to allow some of the high bandwidth data transfer to be performed wirelessly, but there may remain electro-magnetic interference (EMI), spectrum availability, and licensing issues with RF systems.
As a result, there is a need to be able to transfer large amounts of data (e.g., in-flight entertainment content) onto an airplane at higher data rates than currently possible through existing communications technologies. There is also a need to update IFE content on commercial airlines' aircraft without requiring the presence of maintenance personnel on-site to upload new content manually.